Executive Summary

LexDAO is a pioneering collective of legal engineering professionals dedicated to transforming the legal landscape through blockchain technology. Our mission is to democratize access to justice by making legal services more accessible, verifiable, and enforceable. With a proven track record of securing over $200K in community funding and supporting innovative projects, we are uniquely positioned to advance the Web3 grants ecosystem. Our strategic goals include creating a comprehensive grant catalog, applying consistently for at least $100K in monthly grants, and actively engaging with our community to drive innovation and impact.

LexDAO Background

LexDAO is organized to form a club of legal engineering professionals, united to innovate and bring the traditional legal settlement layer to code, and coded agreements to the masses. We believe that everyone deserves access to justice provided in a quick and efficient manner. If legal services were easier to use, verify, and enforce, we could live in a fairer world.

Distributed ledger technology offers solutions to many problems in the legal space. Our mission is to research, develop and evangelize first-class legal methods and blockchain protocols that secure rules and promises with code rather than trust. We do this by training LexDAO-certified legal engineers and building LexDAO-certified blockchain applications. We strive to balance new deterministic tools with the equitable considerations of law to better serve citizens on a cooperative and nonprofit basis for the primary and mutual benefit of its members and common good.

LexDAO Grants Committee

As a 501c6 organization, LexDAO serves as a hub for advanced legal engineering discussions and a catalyst for Web3 development. Our Grants Committee, established in 2023, has successfully secured over $200K in community funding, supporting numerous innovative projects in the Web3 space. As part of our operating structure, we are primarily funded by membership donations and by grants. Back in 2023, three of our members decided to create the first formal committee responsible for these activities DAO wide. It includes a system for administering grants in as well as grants out and chartered the first standing committee within our organization.

Our committee is structured as a 3 person team supported by a variety of authorized multisignature wallets that ensure grants administration is conducted by delegated authority. A three person team helps ensure we have flexibility in operations, specific measures of autonomy, and security against unilateral command and control. Collaboratively we work to both apply for funding as well as to help support projects related to open source law as a public good. This includes thought leadership, charitable causes, application development, research, and advocacy across the space. We are a chartered organization with limited-delegated authority that has distinct responsibilities within the DAO to help identify opportunities, allocate funding, and ensure fiduciary responsibility. We also provide mentoring and guidance when our members look to apply for grants either within our ecosystem or in other areas.

Grant Committee Charter

Our charter is located here and was voted in by our membership in 2023 on Snapshot.

Mission

The Grant Committee has been formed to assist in the day to day management of finding, winning, and allocating grant funding on behalf of LexDAO for the advancement of legal engineering, public goods, crypto-law advocacy, and the LexDAO Guild.

We plan to help alleviate some of the administrative burden of the Operating Committee by helping manage incubator projects and priority initiatives within the DAO as well as the terms surrounding those projects. In helping steward these projects, we plan to work with the DAO Membership, Operating Committee, and those seeking funding to ensure the money LexDAO obtains through grants is effectively and responsibly allocated across LexDAO for projects best suited to the advancement of the guild.

Team

• Tertius: eth:0xCC976F37b22B67660D78D9BA9157ABC2131c6F5d
• Cimply: eth:0x425df00165FbF11E23060E036eBDFbAF4F0EDd20
• Bestape: eth:0x0D89421D6eec0A4385F95f410732186A2Ab45077

Grants Committee Multisig Wallets

Arbitrum: arb1:0x397fC00A3aE26cF7EE7C7CC959d7092a30Da25D9

Optimism:
oeth:0xad19dA9107824a345bF18D8A481859F31803F327

Etherium: eth:0x226dAaeBc9d864533f8F86493225F2E3B91565A8

Application Pillars

Contributions

Our charter, developed using best practices from the American Grant Writers Association, has enabled us to standardize ethical grant writing practices and responsible administration across our organization. As part of LexDAO’s history of supporting high-impact projects, we have funded or supported projects such as DAO Coalition, Lobby3, LexClinic and KaliDAO, which have significantly contributed to the Web3 ecosystem by promoting open-source law and decentralized governance in a variety of ways. In addition, we have significantly built out our GitHub Grants Committee Repository as a place for storing and managing grant activities. We have successfully applied to multiple grants over the last 2 years totaling well over $200K in community funding.

Development

In the 2nd half of 2024, we have taken on the significant project of supercharging our Grants-In efforts by creating a grant opportunity dashboard to better leverage the benefits of crowd-sourcing contributions across LexDAO. This is a prototype, but is allowing us to formalize the funnel of priority initiatives so that we can continue to get ahead of funding needs across the DAO.

In addition, we continue to test ways to upskill our members use of GitHub to allow for a seamless application for development projects they would like to pursue. Over the years, we have funded DAO Coalition, Lobby3, KaliDAO, Curia, MetaCartel, TaterDAO, Real World Assets, MCON, MetaCartel, and others.

Our goal is to bring formality to the grant writing process, fiduciary responsibility to spending initiatives, and to reward great work with ongoing organizational support.

Aggregation

As part of our integrated business strategy, LexDAO aims to not only administrate, but to find ways to create repositories of information for our membership and the general public. We provide a weekly and monthly newsletter that often includes information related to grants we are pursuing and updates on our activities across the organization. As we continue to explore new ways of implementing web3 tooling, we plan to take the foundations of our Grants Tracker and build it into web applications that help utilize the permanence and security of the crypto space in new and ethical ways.

Experiments

We are working on a project of cataloging DAO activities including Grants projects using an AI based application known as Concierge run by Kyler Wandler. We are also pursuing a number of Business Process Models and Notation (BPMN) to help codify elements of our processes using AI and standard programming input/outputs run by Anson Parker.

More recently, we have been experimenting with both a CRED based system of on-chain points to help track reputation management, as well as recording of meeting decisions using on-chain applications integrated with Snapshot. Ultimately, this is where we see significant strategic implications not only for the grants ecosystem, but for contributions to our larger community. While we have had limited success with this particular deployment located here we have started down the road of creating an ecosystem that allows contributors to submit their accomplishments and receive reputation points by the committee.

We've done detailed exploration of applications with Hypercerts led by Clinamenic which is intended to help build a credible attestation system. We are in the process of continuing our research here which we hope will lead to systems that allow LexDAO and other credible communities to help vouch for quality projects.

We have also been working on a strategic initiative related to Hats Protocol which will help manage rights and privileges to members as well as their reputation as stewards of the DAO.

Expertise and Vision

Our team combines extensive experience in both Web3 and traditional grant writing, uniquely positioning us to address the challenges of funding non-profit entities. We aim to revolutionize the Web3 grants ecosystem by implementing strategic plans and ethical standards that ensure transparency, accountability, and sustained impact. What we've observed across the space is a standard set of issues when trying to fund a non-profit entity:

1. Awareness of Grant Opportunities
2. Consistency in Applying for Grants
3. Management of Funds
4. Assessing Credibility of Projects
5. Accountability and Enforcement

Generally, the follow through on projects supported by funding tends to be a recurring issue, especially in the Web3 Space. We believe that must change. While we would like to believe that digital algorithms protect us against rhetoric, the reality is that charisma and volume are even more persuasive in communities that are build-first digital communities. The grants ecosystem and the mechanisms for funding generally lack cohesive strategic plans, milestones, and ethical standards.

We believe that slow and steady can win the race by continually building process first and tools second. The greatest issue with adoption of the promise of web3 is user experience and interpretation of information signals. We're aiming to help act as an oracle for law, justice, and code by seeking out ways to incrementally improve the way funding can be accessed both by LexDAO and organizations we endorse.
This can only be done by encouraging cooperative principles, enforcing clear ethical standards, and attracting great talent.

Impact and Feasibility

Our immediate goals include creating a comprehensive grant catalog to improve lead times, applying for at least $100K in grants monthly, and actively engaging with our members to highlight their projects and explore new grant opportunities. We will measure our success through key performance indicators such as the number of grants secured, the diversity of funding sources, and the impact of funded projects on the Web3 ecosystem. Our medium term objectives include:

1. Better catalogue upcoming grants to improve lead times
2. Apply for at least $100K of grants per month to ensure we are active in the community
3. Continue to consistently meet with our members to showcase their great projects and to discuss grant opportunities we would like to pursue
4. Encourage submissions of project ideas through our team to help cultivate advanced integrated strategies in a distributed ecosystem
5. Continue to review and articulate assessments of opportunities
6. Attempt to find on-chain ways to manage grant funding and preserve our membership's overarching right to decide the direction of our organization
7. Steward methodologies for leveraging the LexDAO brand to evaluate and review projects across the space with on-chain attestation
8. Evaluate and ideate on ways to bring accountability to the space by using proprietary (but open-source) solutions like on-chain escrow.
9. Develop additional ways for information sharing and "bounty board" style opportunities to both help contribute intellectually to applications as well as to apply for funding.
10. Run self-deployed donation events that utilize on-chain tooling and integrate with other programs we run across the DAO and with external partners.

Budget Breakdown

In applying for these grants, we expect to need to increase our access to funds to support our leadership teams, attract talent, develop application alpha tests, and keep projects on track.

As we continue to seek funding for the improvements to our Grants Committee and the wider web3 open-source community, we have traditionally been frugal and mostly pro-bono in our time working on these projects. In order to properly support the next phase of this initiative, we are aiming to raise (through this grant and others) $100K by the end of 2024 to be used for:

1. Web3 Application Development: $20,000
2. Research and Publication: $20,000
3. Administration: $10,000
4. Events and Public Relations: $15,000
5. Systems Improvements: $10,000
6. CoWork Compensation: $10,000
7. Information Repository Improvements: $15,000

Metrics

Our Key Performance Indicators will include the following over the next 12 months:

1. Number of DAO Projects Cited in Grant Applications
2. Inflow of Grant Funding a. Amount of total dollars received b. Unique funding sources c. Unique topics awarded funding d. Number of unique donors
3. Outflow and Administration of Grants a. Number of completed projects using grant funding b. Number of unique partners involved in Grant Projects c. Adoption and Content population of Grant Github d. Number of Contributors to Grant applications

Information Sharing

Our projects are open source unless otherwise stated. We are doing everything possible to cultivate an environment where we share our work and collaborate on ideas. We intend to continue to use any and all available channels to communicate openly with both our members and the public.